


so sweet and so cold

by bazzystar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Angst Fluff??, Bucky in Romania, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Plucky Is Real, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 21:43:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6874795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bazzystar/pseuds/bazzystar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thin slice of time between rescuing Steve and a tiny life in Bucharest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so sweet and so cold

Imagine:  
He doesn't fall. He doesn't fall, reaches out just a little farther and Steve grabs his hand and he doesn't fall. He's standing next to Peggy when Steve goes into the ice. They both cry. He marries a girl named Laurel. He dies a year before Steve comes out of the ice.

Or:  
He lives longer than Peggy, lives long enough for Steve to visit him in the nursing home. Lives long enough to see those blue eyes fill with tears at the thought of being alone.

Or:  
He stays by Steve's side and he's with him in the plane, goes into the ice with him, only he doesn't survive and when they pull them both out they don't even bother to try to resuscitate him.

Or:  
He's with Steve in the plane. They reach for each other in those final moments as the radio crackles. Their hands are clasped as water fills the cockpit, fingers interlaced, and when they wake up it's the future. When they wake up it's together.

Or:  
He falls.  
He dies.  
He never has to know any of the other possibilities.

None of these things happen.

-

He wakes up in the woods. His jacket is dry but his boots are still wet from the river. He estimates he's been out about four hours. It is dusk. He gets to his feet, looks around. Examines his body.

Soldier intact. Uncompromised.  
Uncompromised?

Blue eyes flashing out of a blood-covered face. _You're my friend._

Soldier intact. Uncompromised. _Bucky._

He shakes his head. A spike of pain lances through his brain and he drops to one knee, metal fingers digging into his skull as though he could crush the pain. The pain grows bigger and brighter and he staggers back to his feet, stumbles forward, collapses into a tree. He shakes his head again, a low mewling sound coming out of him, a confused animal looking for the source of the pain. He drops heavily to his knees and then, blessedly, there is darkness.

He wakes up in the woods. His jacket is dry and his boots are dry and it is full dark. He gets to his feet.

He steals a shirt from a homeless man's shopping cart while the bum sleeps in a doorway, pulls it over his head, shoves his metal hand into the pocket of his pants. He needs gloves more than he wants to stay away from people. He nudges the bum awake, shows him his knife. Asks him where he can get clothes.

The donation bins are in the parking lot of a supermarket. He tears one of them open with the metal hand; he finds a pair of gloves, a cleaner shirt, pants, a hat. He balls up his old clothes and shoves them into the hole, then drags the other bin closer. They'll find the hole eventually but he'll take all the time he can get.

He realizes then that he is running away. He is not returning to HYDRA, to the cage and the cold and the restless fractured sleep. _You're my friend._

Compromised. 

_Bucky._

He goes to the National Mall. 

He walks the length of the reflecting pool, silver in the moonlight. He takes the winding paths through monuments to wars he remembers only in flashes, moments of consciousness on his way to a target. The glossy stone wall of names stills him, steals his breath. He takes off his gloves and trails both hands along the letters, metal fingers making a tiny sound as they pass over the grooves. 

He stands in front of the fountains for a long time, watching the water arc through the air. He looks at the reliefs carefully, searching for a memory. He presses himself into an alcove and stays there until the sun comes up, watching, waiting.

Then he goes to the museum.

-

It is his face.

He stares at it for as long as he can, then slams into the bathroom, clutching the edge of the sink as he leans toward the mirror.  
It is his face.

He doesn't remember what he looks like, doesn't know who he is, but the man on the bridge called him Bucky and the man in the museum's name is Bucky and they have the same face. The museum says he died, says he was the only one of Captain America's - Steve Rogers' - special squadron to die during the war.  
Steve Rogers knew him and he called him Bucky and his face is in a museum.

His grip tightens on the sink and the porcelain shatters around his gloved left hand. He jerks his hands back and whirls away from the mirror, his head throbbing with pain, and shoves the door open. 

_He died,_ he thinks as he walks out the doors, hat pulled low. _But I didn't._  
  
_Did I?_

He spends the night curled up in a doorway, knowing every moment he stays in this city is a moment closer to being found. He needs to move.

There is a drop point in the city, a place where HYDRA will meet him when he's completed the mission. They will have weapons there, and money, and they are looking for him but he has no other choice. He makes the call.

He kills all six of them, feeling a strange and unwelcome sickness as he does.

He takes a passport and an identification card from the last one, a young dark-haired man who is usually responsible for attaching the leads to his head and chest during reconditioning. He does not know the man's name but the man calls him солдат. All of them call him солдат.

He pays cash to be smuggled into the underbelly of a cargo plane, spends fifteen hours curled into a ball surrounded by the smell of machine oil, chemicals, metal. His head aches. The cold is familiar. 

Romania is also familiar, somehow. He speaks the language - he speaks every language - but it is something more than that, a kind of emotional resonance almost like a bruise. He feels, as he looks around his tiny rented room, that he is supposed to be here. 

He covers the windows. He finds a mattress on the street - he hasn't slept in years, not voluntarily, not like a human being - and he puts it on the floor. Lying down feels strange at first, and he doesn't sleep well for at least the first month. He lies there for hours on his back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, letting the memories come to him carefully, afraid he'll startle them away before he can pin them down. 

He buys a notebook, a pen, a bar of chocolate, an orange.  
He writes: _I think my name is Bucky Barnes._  
He crosses out _I think._  
He writes: _I have done terrible things._

The notebook fills up. He tucks it away, under the floorboards, his neatly catalogued sins.

He likes the chocolate but he loves the orange, the aliveness of it, the way the smell lingers on his hands. 

He buys more oranges, more notebooks, a lemon, a pomegranate. He makes brief eye contact with the woman that sells him the fruit and she does not smile but she doesn't look afraid, either.  
He writes: _Steve Rogers/Captain America. Blue eyes._  
He writes: _He was my friend._  
He feels something twist inside of him.  
_He saved my life once._  
_He could never find shoes that fit._  
_He_

He puts the pen down, goes back out. He buys aspirin, bolts four tablets dry.

_They put something in my brain. I killed people. With my hands. Guns. Knives. This arm. They made me into something._

Two more notebooks into the backpack under the floor.

He rolls over and stares at the wall. The light filtering through the newspapers is weak but it aggravates his headache and he winces, closes his eyes. He sleeps. He dreams.

_-Steve swimming, tiny, laughing and splashing water toward-_  
_-a roller coaster, smell of popcorn smell of spun sugar-_  
_-hair falling over his eyes he's drawing something now he keeps looking at-_  
_-blood so much blood grimed into the metal plates the arm the fingers-_  
_-what is a roller coaster-_  
_-an arm around Steve's shoulder small warm body against-_  
_-a windpipe collapsing a windpipe being crushed-_

He wakes up drenched in sweat. He feels tears rolling down his cheeks. It is dark behind the newspapers. He picks up the pen.

_Steve._

He lingers on this one, tries to make it last. There is so much red in his dreams, in his head, every stone he turns over is dripping with it but it is not all of him. It can't be. Once he was seventeen and filled with longing and his best friend's eyes were blue. They have tried so hard to take him away, make him not himself but Steve knew him, knew him instantly, and he didn't know Steve but something inside of him woke and stretched and cried out to be heard and now he is here, remembering, lying on the floor in the weak morning light in a studio apartment in Bucharest. 

He knows he won't see Steve again, knows that's too much even to ask. Neither of them should be alive and yet somehow, impossibly, both of them are. They found each other one last time, saved each other one last time. He will never, never be able to pay the debt that he owes the world but he pulled Steve Rogers from the river and that, he thinks, is at least something. 

He shuts the notebook, puts that one on top of the fridge. He wants to read it again later. 

He puts on his gloves, goes downstairs, walks to the market. The air is thin and crisp and he feels lighter, he thinks. He doesn't remember a lot of feelings but this one is, as feelings go, pretty okay.

The woman that sells the fruit is busy today, and he scans the table while he waits. Plums, he thinks. Sit by the window, maybe uncover a corner and look out at the plaza, and eat a plum. 

The woman that sells the fruit makes eye contact with him.

Bucky smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote something that made me suffer so if it also makes you suffer i apologize. i mostly wanted to write something that would be DONE so that any of you who are here because of the femfic know that i am capable of finishing things and very committed to finishing that particular thing. i just kept thinking about the goddamn plums, the tiny joy of buying the things that you want when you want them because you have urges and desires and they are yours! and no one else's! anyway.


End file.
